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IRIM Team Awarded ICRA Best Paper Award

Jun 8, 2017 | Atlanta, GA

An interdisciplinary team of graduate students and faculty from the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM) won the Best Multi-Robot Systems Paper Award at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). The conference was held May 29-June 3 in Singapore.

The award-winning paper, "The Robotarium: A Remotely Accessible Swarm-Robotics Research Test Bed,” was coauthored by IRIM faculty and graduate students from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), the School of Aerospace Engineering (AE), the School of Mechanical Engineering (ME), and the interdisciplinary robotics Ph.D. program at Georgia Tech.

In this paper, the authors noted that the resources required to build and to maintain a world-class swarm-robotics lab is oftentimes quite prohibitive. As a result, lack of access to this kind of facility is a significant bottleneck. Led by IRIM Executive Director Magnus Egerstedt, the Robotarium solves this problem by allowing researchers to upload their code, run experiments remotely at Georgia Tech, and then receive the scientific data.

Since its launch in January 2016, over 100 remote experiments have been conducted on the Robotarium from research groups all over the world, with applications ranging from intelligent transportation to urban search-and-rescue and precision agriculture. The IRIM team’s paper describes a number of user-cases, the Robotarium architecture, the Experiment Description Language developed to allow for rich and expressive experiments to be scripted, and the cyber-physical security aspects associated with a remotely accessible research test bed.